Greetings, people of OA

[Rho Ophiuchi]

The Negentropy Alliance and a few other polities/groups/people concern themselves with maximizing their lifetime into at least multi-trillion year timescales or beyond, but the majority of the setting does not.

You'd actually do better in OA to just set the material aside and the use conversion tech to convert it to energy rather than storing it as amat (amat production is highly inefficient unless you have access to a Q-mirror - which are not generally available - and then you have to go to all the bother of storing it and whatnot.

The energy usage of the setting is comparatively low compared to what is available. Most stars are allowed to keep radiating into space and have not (yet) been disassembled, most matter has not been reorganized into convenient storage for future use into deep time. That may happen eventually (the Negentropy Alliance probably has plans for this somewhere). Quadrillion or quintillion year timescales don't currently concern the population of the setting and don't appear to concern their archailect rulers. Or if they do they may intend to create new universes with fresh supplies of matter and energy and just move there - wash/rinse/repeat as each universe dies. The archai can do that, after all.



As mentioned, the transapients and archai manipulate things so that people don't do that. That means that people who are inclined to breed like rabbits experience some series of events or interactions with others that end up changing their minds (e.g., 'events' conspire such that they meet and fall madly in love with someone who passionately believes in limited population growth or some other endeavor besides having lots of kids and so the breeding binge is forestalled). Or people who are really inclined to breed end up having 'accidents' that eliminate them and their ideas from society. Or - if the archai decide to play overt hardball - a given 'breed breed and breed some more ' population will simply find themselves unable to conceive children. If they get aggressive about it and start attacking others who are limiting their own numbers they will be summarily stopped - by military force backed by archai level tech if necessary. Or the breeding population will undergo a mass Rewrite with their minds being remade into a belief set that doesn't involve unlimited breeding.

At the end of the day, the lower minds in the setting exist solely at the sufferance and mercy of the AI Gods and have no rights except what those Gods choose to allow them to have.

Hope this helps,

Todd

Hello Todd,

First, how do I (or is this allowed) remove quotes within quotes - I just figured out the quote button, and did not want to clutter up the thread with long chains of quotations.

Would a population-optimized society be possible on a smaller scale? For instance, ten billion entities living off of sixty terawatts of power made from slowly burning the matter on the surface of a rouge planet, essentially fully aware that any energy-intensive activities they preformed were simply reducing their own lifespan? If somewhere like this already exists, could you by any chance provide a link?

On a slightly different note, what is the highest temperature genetically-engineered humans that were originally baselines could plausibly live in? Could a clade of genetically-engineered humans exist on a supercritical pyrohydrothallasic world, for instance? Also, would there be a region on the fringe of human colonization where the archailects had no influence due to being temporally disconnected from those locations (e.g. at a radius of 9000 light-years or so)?

Sincerely,
Rho Ophiuchi

Edit: To your latest post (I could not figure out how to edit quotes into posts either), thank you for providing the links you did, I really appreciate it.